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Yard Art

12-28-2009, 02:31 PM

This was one of my first TIG projects. It's a three dimensional stainless steel sculpture of our company logo. The logo is representative of our business - industrial controls automation - the arrows represent - up, down, in, out and round and round. They are the basic motions that all industrial machinery implements.

The construction is of 16 ga stainless steel sheet that was laser cut. Each facet is a separate piece of sheet. There was a lot or welding on this - nearly 100 linear feet of TIG weld. I got pretty good at it by the time I was done . The sphere came from a company in Wisconsin that makes ornamental stainless items - I decided I was not up to fabricating something like that. To give an idea of scale the sphere is 10" in diameter.

Between welding, grinding and finishing I calculate close to 100 hours of labor - way more than I envisioned when I started. It took close to a year of part time effort (weekends, evenings, etc) and a fair amount of barley and hops. It does get a good number of compliments so I guess it was worth it.

The PDF file shows the drawing the individual pieces that were laser cut from. The picture is of the completed project. The third file is the 3D file of the company logo.

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Dan,
Actually we would be a consumer of Banner sensors. We do controls engineering, design, control panel fabrication, machine wiring, program and debug of PLC's, robots, etc. I'm VP of Sales and Operations - about 30 employees doing work all over the country and world. It's a fun business to be in, always something new. We have customers in the solar industry, energy - power and monitoring, recycling and still some automotive.

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Ok, I work for banner, formerly designing vision sensors and lighting. I am not going to be just working with lighting, the EZ lights to machine vision lighting.

I myself have been involved with automation for several years, on the side besides my welding business I build a couple custom machines a year with a local machine shop. I most definatly is fun and exciting stuff.

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very good challenge to keep straight align the arrows weld at opposite side on a sphere. It,s a very nice looking logo
Ricau

Ricau,
Yes it was a challenge to keep the arrows aligned. I had to build a couple of fixtures to align the arrows around the sphere - fixtures and clamps, a lot of tacking and then weld it up. The sphere is 12 ga and the arrows are 16 ga, I had to learn a few things along the way.

I had not tig welded anything but scraps before this project, but there was so much welding to do that I got pretty good at it by the time I was done.

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80% of failures are from 20% of causesNever compromise your principles today in the name of furthering them in the future."All I ever wanted was an honest week's pay for an honest day's work." -Sgt. Bilko"We are generally better persuaded by reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others." -Pascal"Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything." -Pascal

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I bought the sphere, I did not have a lathe big enough or the experience to spin the two half spheres it is made of. I found a company in Wisconsin that makes ornamental stainless items like the sphere - I think I paid about $180 for it - seemed reasonable given the complexity of making your own.

It is made pf two half spheres welded together - they did a really nice job of making a full sphere.